Estamos muy afortunados!

We wanted to hike the Parque Nacional Municipalitano again today.  It was going to this unique rainforest park a few weeks ago when we met Jill and Gary at the bus station at Albrook waiting to board the same bus to the park.  Not only were we happy to meet another English-speaking couple but were also delighted to discover they were not simply on holiday but are fellow like-minded adventurers.  We will be friends and will see each other many times again in the future.  Jill and Gary have moved on to another part of the country but we look forward to meeting them there soon.  We chatted all through our hike that day, discovering more and more interesting things about each other and our travels.  We saw a number of animals that day strictly by accident as we paid little attention to deliberately looking for wildlife.  Stan and I planned a slow, very quiet hike today in hopes of finding more.

We had big plans.  We’d get there early enough to see animals at their most active times – maybe between 7 am and 10 am but we should know ourselves by now.  As our dear friend, Ron Canda often said, “Not gonna happen”.  And, it did not.  We left the apartment late, of course, and wouldn’t you know we boarded the wrong bus to the park.  The driver let us off as near the park as possible and we walked the mile or so there.  No problem, we got to see another corner of the city and logged more steps on our watches.  We arrived about 11 am.  Hardly entering the park we saw three people gazing up in the trees.  A sloth.  Yes, a sloth!  Even with the help of my iPhone camera zoomed in tight or even looking through the threesome’s scope, the sloth looked like a big glob of coarse blond hair huddled on a tree limb.  But it was real; it moved, very slowly but it moved! How exciting!  Actually seeing that two-toed sloth in the wild inspired us to hunt even more carefully. 

The price we paid for seeing that little guy was seeing nothing, nada, nothing-else the rest of the trek.  No monkeys, no coati, no howlers, not even a big centipede.  Oh wait, we did see a pair of nutria but apparently they are very plentiful and have little fear of people, and we saw a virtual herd of turtles by the pond. Still the rain forest was beautiful and we tried . . . we were hunters.  We walked quietly and we paused every now and then to listen.  Bird songs were pretty, but we could not see them as they blended into the forest perfectly.  We pealed our eyes searching for another big blonde hairy glob atop a limb but not today.  We looked and listened for monkeys thrashing about in the trees but no, no monkeys either.  Nature said to us, the sloth is all you get!

But here’s where we did get lucky.  We were slugging our way up a steep hill when we heard it coming . . . rain.  Oh well, we said, what can be done now?  We brought no rain gear at all.  The rain was light at that moment but we could hear it growing harder.  Not 10 yards later on the trail we turned a bend and there was a huge covered pavilion where perhaps lectures were held in the past.  Eternally grateful, we seated ourselves on a concrete bench and proceeded to watch the rain grow heavier and heavier like that in monsoon.  Considering we were dry, it was quite pleasant just sitting there hearing nothing but the rain falling on the forest.  Just as the rain began to really pour, five young travelers from Germany popped into the pavilion.  They were damp but made it to the shelter just in time to keep from being totally drenched.  Fifteen minutes later four other hikers arrived – soaked up, down and all around.  The one young man in the party took off his shirt and literally wrung a bucket full of water out of it.  He then used his wet shirt to dry himself.

The rain fell in earnest for about an hour.  Thunder rumbled but we saw no lightning.

How can it be that we were kept dry??? We just kept saying:  Wow, are we lucky!  Wow! Are we lucky!  Later we translated it to somos muy afortunados.   

On the afternoon return bus home, some unknown but horrendous accident or other incident tied-up rush hour traffic for hours.  Apparently our bus was only a short distance from the cause, but we were locked in.  Could not go forward; could not go in reverse.  We were there so long that bus drivers exited their vehicles to investigate and confer.  After a long while, several vans full of police officers headed to the site of the commotion but we could not learn what happened.  We were just stuck.  Many cars to the left of us and behind us slowly reversed their way backing up to the last left turn in order to exit the blocked highway.  Finally our bus had enough room to turn around and drive the blocked street in the wrong direction to make that turn as well.  That creative bus driver got us home.  Still we wonder, what the heck was going on???

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